Giotto's chapel in Padua is smaller than most people expect, a plain brick hall tucked behind the Arena gardens, and the first surprise is that you are rationed. Visits are timed and short, and groups wait in a climate-controlled room first so that the breath and humidity of too many people do not harm the paint. Then the doors open and the walls turn blue. Around 1305 the banker Enrico Scrovegni commissioned Giotto to cover the whole interior with the lives of Mary and Christ, and what he painted, people with weight, faces with feeling, a sky that behaves like a sky, changed the course of European painting.
Padua holds more than that one room. The city's fourteenth-century fresco cycles also include the Baptistery by the cathedral, covered in a dome of paradise by Giusto de' Menabuoi, the Oratory of San Giorgio, the Eremitani church and the great hall of the Palazzo della Ragione. They were recognised by UNESCO as a group in 2021, and walking between them is a good way to see a city that was once a rival of Venice and one of the great intellectual centres of Italy. Its university dates from 1222 and Galileo taught here for eighteen years. The basilica of Saint Anthony, simply called il Santo, draws pilgrims from all over the world, and the vast oval of Prato della Valle makes a pleasant place to sit among statues and canals.
For a rider, Padua is a city to park and walk. The centre has restricted traffic, so use the car parks near the Scrovegni and walk in, and book the chapel in advance. The landscape around is flat, but only a few kilometres south-west rise the Euganean Hills, a cluster of old volcanic cones covered in vineyards, chestnut woods and villas, with narrow winding roads that climb to hilltop villages such as Arquà Petrarca, where the poet Petrarch spent his last years. The roads are tight, sometimes rough, and busy with cyclists on weekends.
Fuel and food are no trouble in a city of two hundred thousand, and the local specialities include risotto with spring vegetables, bigoli pasta and a good spritz in the evening. Spring and autumn bring clear light, and fog in winter turns the plain into a grey room.